Friday, 16 November 2007

Blair's talking furniture

The news that Tony Blair's furniture has launched its own website - http://tonyblairoffice.org/ - comes as little surprise to anyone who already considers the man to be as mad as a bucket of eels. Either that or Cherie's persuaded him to start 419-scamming to boost the family finances (From the Office of Mr Barrister Blair: When I was ejected from office, my policies led to a deposit of £24bn in the Bank of Northern Wreck ...)

How appropriate, though, that the 'Tony Blair Sports Foundation' is to sponsor, er, indoor rowing. This involves much grunting, sweat and expenditure of energy but you don't actually get anywhere. A metaphor for Blair's record if ever there was one.

Thursday, 15 November 2007

Labour's State Security apparatus

Brown's inane proposals to introduce security screening at large mainline train stations have quite rightly been dismissed as wholly ineffective by security experts. Packed suburban commuter trains into London offer a far more attractive target to Islamic suicide bombers than a half-empty Virgin intercity. And why pay several hundred quid for an intercity ticket when Livingstone's Oyster card will get you on a suburban service for chips? And of course no screening for tubes and buses where the bombs have actually gone off. No, Brown's proposals are nothing more than a ratcheting-up of the apparatus of State Security disguised as an anti-terrorist measure - his real intention is to get us all used to the hostile stares of gun-toting thugs and State Security Forces demanding our papers.

I recently listened to the views of a very stupid police officer on how to deal with the 'problem' of groups of youths on the street. High fences and razor-wire erected everywhere were this idiot's preferred remedies, combined with Mosquito sonic repellents erected on lamp posts every 30 metres. He saw nothing wrong in turning the streets into something akin to the Warsaw Ghetto - his sole concern was the convenience with which teenagers could be coralled into barbed-wire pens by response cars to make the job of police officers easier.

Unfortunately, when the government takes the advice on a grand scale of 'security professionals' as deluded and as intellectually ill-equipped as this, you get proposals such as Brown's.

The time is long overdue to bring our Police Forces back under local control, to silence the fatuous blitherings of slow-minded plods who imagine they are expert at anything, and send them back out walking their beats.

Let's also devolve the administration of Welfare payments to local level - and get some of our 5.3m economically inactive (including a very substantial proportion of Pakistani, Somali and Bangladeshi young men) doing something useful - cleaning hospitals, or doing 12-hour shifts in McDonalds - that keeps them away from the illiterate and unschooled village Imams and the internet bomb-making manuals.

The answer to our security lies not in the power of the State, but in our own control of our neighbourhoods and communities.

Wednesday, 14 November 2007

A threat that doesn't ring true

Tell me, if the Prime Minister announced that the threat of being stabbed on Britain's streets was now so great that he advised the public not to venture out without donning stab-vests and body armour, would you not ask why he was failing rather to address the source of the threat?

Yet he is expected to announce today that the correct response to the threat of terrorism is to spend many billions of pounds on protecting buildings against car bombers.

Let's be clear. The threat, on the basis of convictions obtained so far, is from Islamic terrorists, and in particular those from the Pakistani and Somali communities that Labour, in a naive zeal of multicultutalism, have allowed to develop separately from the rest of the population into festering ghettoes of overcrowding, poverty, ignorance, disease and hostility.

If the threat is real, and cogent, and compelling, then we must deal with the source of the threat, without any mealy-mouthed prevarication.

If the threat is not real, but merely cynical opportunism on the part of Gordon Brown to reinforce centralist State control over the lives of all citizens by crude threat propaganda, then he is playing with fire.

Tuesday, 13 November 2007

Earlier this year the government brought forward new measures to deal with those who employ illegal immigrants. The Home Office website warns:

In 2008, new measures to help tackle illegal migrant working will come into force. These measures, contained in the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 (‘the 2006 Act’), include:

a system of civil financial penalties for employers who, through negligence, employ illegal migrant workers;

a new criminal offence for employers who knowingly use illegal migrant labour, carrying a maximum two year prison sentence and/or an unlimited fine;

and,a continuing responsibility for employers of migrant workers with limited leave to enter or remain in the UK to check their ongoing entitlement to work in the UK.

I trust the news that Jacqui Smith and her mandarins knew months ago that thousands of illegal immigrants were being employed by Whitehall as security guards will now result in several criminal prosecutions - including that of the Home Secretary. Or will it be another case of one law for us, and another law for them?

The more Gordon Brown speaks in public, the more I am convinced that his reputed intellect is a hollow pot. His speech to the City was embarrassingly poor.

Take his proposals for a global ban on the sale of small arms. Does he honestly believe that depriving the African tribes of AK47s will cause them to take up reading Sidney Webb and form bead-making co-operatives? Has he considered the reality that they'll just go back to slaughtering each other with rusty spears and pangas instead?

And his proposals for the UN Security Council, that nations such as Japan, India, Brazil, Germany and 'an African country' should have a seat at the top table. Perhaps the Boy Milliband is unaware that the United Nations was the term given to the military alliance that fought the Axis, that those at the top table are the nations with serious nuclear capability. Pakistan would never agree to India having a seat, and given the propensity of all African nations for massive corruption, how would one be selected for this bonanza, this rich prize - the potential for receiving bribes on a global scale by the lucky winner is immense, and competition would be fierce for the Security Council veto to be sold to the highest bidder.

The rest is a jejune mish-mash of nostrums, platitudes and bromides that would earn any keen young socialist sixth former a B+, but from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is an appalling public admission of a rudderless and purblind foreign policy.